Many electronic systems may from time to time enter error, failure, or resource-depletion states where practical remediation requires human intervention or benefits from human oversight. Furnishing timely alerts to users, administrators, or service personnel in such cases can be essential to ongoing system functioning. The effectiveness of alerts depends not merely on their content, but also their time of delivery and channel of presentation. Alerts that occur at inconvenient times or are presented through unsuitable channels may go ignored during critical periods or present a nuisance to users.
Unfortunately, conventional alerting arrangements are deficient in a number of significant aspects. For example, these conventional arrangements generally fail to combine extensive knowledge of system state and events with a range of human and other factors in generating alerts. Conventional arrangements therefore fail to provide adequate context sensitivity when generating alerts, and as a result the alerts are less likely to be received and heeded by users in a timely way.
Moreover, there is no general alerting framework available in the prior art that can be applied to a wide variety of different types of monitoring systems, including storage systems and other types of information technology infrastructure. Such infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex, particularly as a growing number of companies and other enterprises are reducing their costs by migrating portions of their information technology infrastructure to cloud service providers. For example, virtual data centers and other types of systems comprising distributed virtual infrastructure are coming into widespread use. Commercially available virtualization software such as VMware® vSphere™ may be used to build a variety of different types of virtual infrastructure, including private and public cloud computing and storage systems, distributed across hundreds of interconnected physical computers and storage devices. In these and other types of modern information technology infrastructure, effective alerting is crucial to maintaining desired levels of system performance.